The mayor of Monroeville, Alabama confirmed it: Harper Lee has died. Monroeville was Lee's birthplace and deathplace, as well as the basis for Maycomb, the fictional town where Lee set her novels To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman.
Lee's description of Maycomb in TKAM is one the best paragraphs anyone's ever written:
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.
Even if you read that paragraph silently the person sitting next to you can hear it. The assonance and consonance in these sentences is as gratuitous as the heat and humidity of the Alabama summer she describes. And by buttressing the images of poverty (sagging courthouse, fly-bitten mule) with metaphors evoking the southern gentry (teacakes, talcum, "wilted") the reader gets a sense of the relatively extreme class differences among the townsfolk, one of the novel's major tensions. This sort of scene-setting is often a chore or a gilded lily in fiction. Lee was a master of it.
Everybody I've ever met in the U.S. has at some point in their lives read Lee's TKAM, one of the rare books that's as good as it is popular. More than 40 million copies of the novel have been sold, thanks largely to the admiration of middle and high school teachers, who often use the book to examine racism in the Depression-era South.
You know the story. Small-town lawyer Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson, a black man who is falsely accused of rape. We see the town and the trial through the eyes of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, one of the great young heroines in literature, whose punchy demeanor and penchant for asking common sense questions reveals the nonsensical and yet fully entrenched ideologies of racism and sexism. Lee's buddy, Truman Capote, makes a appearance in the novel as Dill, the Finch family's fast-talking summertime neighbor. Lee traveled with Capote to Kansas and greatly assisted his reporting and research for what would later become In Cold Blood.
Before the release of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee was a model of the writer who did one thing very well, got attention for it, and kept clear away from that attention. Though GSAW, despite it's wonderful first chapter, was really just a bad first draft of TKAM, Lee's portrayal of Atticus as a racist in that book helpfully muddied up his character. For too long he'd been reduced to a cardboard cutout of moral rightness. However, I think it's important to remember that the moral righteousness of TKAM's Atticus is massively overstated. Every time Atticus dispenses a wisdom unit in that book, the very next scene often proves him to be a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do moralist. But, alas, the sixth-grade Language Arts curriculum doesn't often have room for structural analysis.
The thing I loved most about TKAM was all of its biting, cynical, feminist, scuppernogging, and incest-bashing humor. If you haven't read the book since middle school, now'd be a good time to dive back in.
RIP, Harper Lee!
